W.D. Richter	...	(Director)
Earl Mac Rauch	...	(Writer)
Peter Weller/ John Lithgow/ Ellen Barkin	...

Summary: Buckaroo Banzai spans roughly 50 years and begins in media res. It doesn't fill in some of the earliest parts of the story until the viewpoint characters themselves unravel the mystery — roughly halfway through the movie. Essentially, the plot concerns the efforts of the multi-talented Dr. Buckaroo Banzai to save the world by defeating a band of inter-dimensional aliens called Red Lectroids.
The theatrical release version of the film opens with Banzai performing a test-run of his Jet Car, a heavily modified Ford E-Series van with New Jersey license plates, powered by a jet engine, and capable of exceeding Mach 1. Despite the vehicle's supposedly advanced propulsion system, when it is shut off, the comic element is that the car diesels, a trait not uncommon to gasoline-powered Ford vehicles of the day. The car is also equipped with a secret device called an "oscillation overthruster", which Banzai and his associates hope will allow it to drive through solid matter. The test is a success; Banzai stuns onlookers by driving the Jet Car directly through a mountain. Emerging from the mountain, Banzai finds that an alien, pod-like organism has attached itself to the car during transit.
Hearing of Banzai's success, Italian physicist Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) breaks out of the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane in New Jersey, where he's been imprisoned for 50 years. In a flashback sequence, we learn that Banzai's assistant and mentor, Dr. Hikita (Robert Ito), was present at a failed overthruster experiment of Lizardo's in 1938. Failing to transit through the target wall, Lizardo is briefly trapped in the 8th dimension where his mind is taken over by Lord John Whorfin, hence his current diagnosis of a delusional disorder.


Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) salutes his Black Lectroid ally as he descends under parachute at the end of the movie.
Whorfin is the leader of the Red Lectroids, a race of alien reptiles whom he had led on an expansionist campaign on Planet 10. After being defeated by the peace-loving Black Lectroids, Whorfin and his band of followers were banished into the formless void of the 8th dimension. Lizardo's failed experiment accidentally released Whorfin, where despite being trapped in Lizardo's body, he maintains his leadership of the Red Lectroids. He soon brings over a thousand of them to Earth in an incident that was reported in 1938 by Orson Welles in his radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, only to have it retracted as fiction.
These Red Lectroids now pose as owners and employees of a defense contracting company named Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. They have been working on building a large spacecraft under the cover of a US Air Force program, the "tri-wing bomber", and intend to rescue the remaining exiles in the 8th dimension, then travel on to Planet 10 and take over. The lack of a working overthruster was a problem until Banzai manages to produce one, and Whorfin hopes to steal it. Banzai's team, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, becomes aware of the Yoyodyne link, and hacks into their computer. They discover that everyone there has the first name John, with various last names such as Yaya, Smallberries, and Bigbooté. At first they believe this is a joke, but then they also note that all the Yoyodyne employees applied for Social Security cards on November 1, 1938 (two days after the War of the Worlds broadcast) and all in the same town, Grover's Mill, New Jersey (the town where the spaceship in the War of the Worlds broadcast landed). They deduce the connection between Lizardo, Yoyodyne and the Lectroids, and inform Banzai.
In the meantime, a Black Lectroid spacecraft orbiting Earth contacts Banzai, giving him a cryptic nonverbal message that enables him to see through Lectroids' natural pheromonic camouflage. (To unassisted humans, Black Lectroids appear to be Rastafarian Jamaicans, while Red Lectroids appear as caucasians.) The ship also sends a "thermo-pod" to Earth, with a messenger who brings Banzai a holographic message from the Black Lectroids' leader, John Emdall, explaining Lord Whorfin's history and motives, and giving an ultimatum: stop Whorfin and his Red Lectroid army, or the Black Lectroids will protect themselves by staging a fake nuclear attack so letting the U.S. and USSR destroy the world in a burst of Cold War paranoia.
With help from the Black Lectroid messenger John Parker, Banzai's usual posse of helpers ("those hard-rockin' scientists, the Hong Kong Cavaliers"), a collection of civilian volunteers named "The Blue Blaze Irregulars" and a young woman named Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), who just happens to be the long-lost twin sister of Buckaroo's late wife, Buckaroo succeeds in his mission, destroying the Red Lectroids and saving Earth. During the end credits, there is a screen title proclaiming the upcoming sequel Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime Leag